We’re thrilled to share some exciting news with you – the final piece of our consolidation to one team and one brand to the outside world is complete as today, we mark the official launch of our new technology, Dextera.

If you’ve followed our news over the past year, you’ll already know that we’ve been in the process of consolidating our brands in favour of offering a range of complementary support services from under one roof. That has meant bringing together and saying goodbye to long established, industry renowned brands – Para-Sols, Apricity and The Art of Finance – and instead, saying hello to one united range of support services as The Verve Group.

The Verve Group initially started as an umbrella brand in 2019 to bring together our then paraplanning, compliance and training businesses, but since its inception, it quickly grew its own range of proposition services and together with the outsourced support offerings from our then sister brands, collectively we became a modern and innovative provider of integrated support services for financial advice firms.

Since January 2021, we’ve been in a period of transformation internally as we restructured our businesses to work as one streamlined business and establishing new departments, systems and processes to build on the strengths of our already award-winning teams.   

So now, instead of being a collection of small businesses of paraplanners, file checkers, compliance consultants and trainers, all of which were working independently of each other – we can now better promote knowledge transfer across departments and offer our clients a single point of contact and a wealth of expertise across the business. It just makes sense. 

18 months since we first conceived of the idea, with new teams assembled and service offerings refined, we’re ready to become one to the outside world. The key to that success being the launch of our new technology, Dextera (or ‘Dex’ to its friends and family!) on Monday 3rd July to existing clients only.   

Since Cathi Harrison, our CEO & Founder, first started Para-Sols some 14 years ago, innovation, ambition and exhilaration has been our driving forces, and Dextera is the masterpiece that brings all of our threads together. Not only is it a bespoke services management system, but it has also been designed to be a business operations dashboard for all advice firms and includes additional features such as a full regulatory framework with integrated policies and registers, a resource hub of guides, news and templates and a training area of annual testing, CPD and supervisor T&C oversight functionality.  

“The most exciting part of Dex for me is it being the final piece of the whole team coming together as one. It’s been a long-time coming.” said Cathi Harrison. “It’s not something I intentionally set out to do when I first created Para-Sols 14 years ago – our growth has been a very natural evolution as we’ve continuously responded to the needs of advisers and the ever-changing demands they face from the wider sector”. Embracing technology has been crucial in that growth and is something we’ve always championed within financial services. Para-Sols built its own bespoke paraplanning system, Rise, some twelve years ago; Apricity Compliance itself was built on regtech foundations back in 2017; and The Art of Finance designed a creative and engaging LMS (learning management system) to gamify training for financial services. “Marrying those three systems together hasn’t been easy, but it has definitely been worth it.” 

Para-Sols and Apricity Compliance websites have now been replaced with our refreshed Verve website (go take a full look around if you haven’t already) and our latest brochure reflects our full suite of services – download it and take a peek! 

So, let’s raise a virtual glass to Dextera and toast our journey thus far. A very special mention goes to the full team for their continued belief, faith and enthusiasm in building something new and of course, to our clients for their ongoing support and encouragement. Here’s to a bright and more efficient future with Dextera by our side. Cheers!